Member Events

Here is the list of nominees (in alpha order by first name) for the Board of Directors Election taking place this weekend, 2-18-18, 5:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.:

Charel Morris

Craig “Zoot” Goldsmith

Gonner Menning

Jack Gilster

Jesse Trujillo

John “JT” Benedetto

Rebecca Snyder

Electronic voting will start Thursday. All active members will receive their ballot via email that day. All voting will be electronic, there will be no paper ballots this year. If you do not want to vote ahead of time, you are welcome to come to the Election Meeting party this Sunday afternoon, and vote at Quelab; there will be food provided! You will need to have access to your email to get to your voting email from the OPAVOTE system to use your specific voter setup (each one is unique).

A REMINDER: The Quelab by-laws state we MUST reach quorum for voter turnout, which is why we have electronic voting, encourage voting ahead of time, and ask that ALL vote in the Board of Directors’ Election. You are even free to submit a blank ballot, and NOT vote for ANYONE; that will still count towards quorum!

Vote Ranking – When voting, everyone will be asked to rank all of the candidates that they want to vote for; they can rank as many candidates as they want. Unless they are voting for only one candidate, the votes must be ranked. The votes will be counted using a single transferable vote system.

This shorter “extra” video is easier to understand concerning the voting system we are using:

The Quelab Board Of Directors Election will be held on Sunday February 18, 2018. Of the seven person Board of Directors, there are four directors finishing out their two year terms, so you will be voting to elect four Directors. The election party will be held at Quelab, starting at 5:00 p.m. and running until 8:00 p.m. or later, if we don’t reach the required voter turnout (per the By-laws, a quorum of voters is required, that is, 52% turnout.) Like last year, we will be providing food, and hope to have Quelab members come out to socialize & enjoy the party. And yes, this timeframe extends into the regularly scheduled 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Hacknight.

Election Process & Voting

The Election will be handled by Josh Pedersen & Celeste Nichols-Gangwere, with assists from other volunteers. We plan to again utilize OpaVote for electronic voting. There will be no paper ballots. Voting will start earlier that week, perhaps Wednesday (exact date still to be set).

Mandatory

NOTE: Per Quelab’s By-Laws, the Election “meeting” is mandatory for all Quelab members, and all members should vote for their choice(s) for Board of Directors (even if that vote is “none of the above”). Fortunately, voting electronically counts as “attendance”. Early electronic voting simplifies things for everyone, and we encourage as many people to vote early as possible. The election team still wants to see as many Quelab members as possible at the party. Come to Quelab & have some fun with us!

Last night, we held our Election Party at Tractor Brewing Wells Park; we had a good turnout of Quelab members. Going into the party at 7PM we had 27 voters request electronic voting codes, which meant we needed only 27 voters to vote in person to make our quorum of 54 votes. We had 12 votes cast in-person, so a mad-dash to get 15 more electronic voters coincided with a convenient extension of the voting period to allow us to keep the polls open until 9PM and get a total of 58 voters through the system.

Using OpaVote to conduct a Scottish STV count, we entered in the in-person votes and ran the tally. Twelve candidates, 49 ballots, and ten rounds of vote allocation, reallocation, and candidate elimination, the final result came down to John Benedetto (JT), Don Menning (Gönner), Charel Morris, and Craig Goldsmith (Zoot) winning seats on the Board of Directors.

For those of you interested in the nitty-gritty of the breakdown, the summary is as follows:(more…)

Today, we at Quelab are celebrating pi and it’s most epic of confluences 3.14.15! Pi, being the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it’s diameter, is an irrational number (which repeats infinitely without any repetitions) but is best approximated to the value 3.1415926. Since it is a geometric and mathematical constant, it’s something that we use unconsciously in our daily lives. the discipline undertaken by those who are obsessed with memorizing the digits of Pi is known as Piphilology, and is a skill which rarely comes in handy, but you never know when knowing pi to the 707th digit could win you praise and plaudits.

However, it is also a day to celebrate the Raspberry Pi, a gateway to learning about computers and programming from the ground up.

The Raspberry Pi is a low cost, credit-card sized computer that plugs into a computer monitor or TV, and uses a standard keyboard and mouse. It is a capable little device that enables people of all ages to explore computing, and to learn how to program in languages like Scratch and Python. It’s capable of doing everything you’d expect a desktop computer to do, from browsing the internet and playing high-definition video, to making spreadsheets, word-processing, and playing games.

For the numerical in the audience, here is a playlist of YouYube videos about Pi from some incredibly geeky folks from the channel “Numberphile”. There are even some tidbits in there for the Tau-fanatics.(more…)